250CODAdecolorizing and de-ashing agent.^12 Lastly, the same material also has a
long history as an artist’s pigment: the famous bone black or ivory black
used since the Baroque period is derived from bone char. These levels of
interconnectedness between animal renderings, artistic practices, and
technocapitalist economies of visibility are regularly lost in the narrativ-
izations of modernity through which animal sacrifices and ritualized ren-
derings have been incorporated, disavowed, and disenchanted.
The industrial purifying qualities of bone char are reenchanted in Bone
Black through an emphasis on the blackness that constitutes it, the white-
ness that it can impart, and the cleansing effect it can have on water and
sugar. Thus, purification is the magical essence of the ritualistic element in
this installation. However, its inscription is ambivalent and ambiguous, sub-
stantially positive but equally ominous. This ambivalence is inscribed in the
drawings’ black-and-white rendering; as the essential noncolors in art, they
simplify, synthesize, and purify the world into distilled images. However,
what is being reenchanted in Swanson’s installation, both representationally
and materially, is the offcut of bovine meat the drawings idealize: they stand
for consumption and waste. This reenchantment is haunted—for, as Shukin
argues, the rendering industry, by efficiently and productively disposing of
the by-product, formulates “itself as the redeemer of the animal carnage of
mass capitalism.”^13 This operation constitutes a radicalization of the nature
of capitalism, its systematic consumption of animals, and its seemingly
endless ability to unravel capital gain from different forms of rendering.^14
In this context, the bed of white sugar upon which some of the bovine
skulls rest becomes a problematic field of forces in which colonialist narra-
tives of exploitation, connecting the agential capacities of humans, bovines,
bees, and the devastating deforestation required to grow sugar cane, are
sedimented. Like desert sand, the expanse of sugar looks inert, but it con-
tains potential. Although in the installation sugar appears embroiled within
chains of devastation and death, it simultaneously is the food given to bees
by beekeepers during the cold winters. The feedback loop of dark ecologies
starts again here. It is obvious at this point that a western preoccupation
with whiteness pervades the whole installation—the notions of purity and
sacrifice inscribed in many components of Out of the Strong, Something Sweet
are suddenly problematized further. The blackness and whiteness of mate-
rialities, and their essentially othering agencies, imply ideological position-
ings and dynamics that still pervade today’s societies.